Follow the Money

One of my duties as Cindy’s man is to take her to brunch with a bunch of other lawyers every so often. They’re mostly women and they like this place called the Banana Cafe that has a piano playing and all-you-can-eat Cuban and Puerto Rican food. My purpose, naturally, is to demonstrate to the girls that Cindy has a steady guy, and I don’t mind her using me as a piece of jewelry because you can bet I wear her as an accessory when I’m out with the guys and sometimes when I meet with clients.

The thing is, I don’t generally have much to add to the conversation. Last week, though, Cindy mentioned my Secret Service experience and one of the gals asked my views on dealing with terrorism. Now I usually work on much smaller problems, but I told them that I did learn one important thing in government service that I apply to my work as a private detective. The Secret Service belongs to the Treasury Department so I learned that to catch the bad guys, you follow the money. I think maybe that applies to terrorists too. I think Washington ought to be working hard to make sure the global financial system is secured against terrorist financing.

Terrorism is driven by two engines: hate and money. Hatred drove those planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11. But it couldn’t have happened without the financial network that Osama bin Laden had set up. I don’t think we can stop the hatred, but if we do it right maybe we can stop the cash flow.

I think the U.S. and her allies have been trying hard to collect and analyze all the data available to track and disrupt the activities of terrorists. But financial intelligence is as hard to gather as it is valuable.

I think financial officials around the world are starting to recognize how important their role is in fighting terrorism. We can’t let people who finance terrorism feel that their money is safe. We need to chase them as hard as we chase the guys making bombs and pointing guns.

Organizations like al Qaeda have to raise, move and store lots of money in order to recruit, train and pay their fighters, support their families, buy fake documents and carry out attacks. When terrorists move money through the banking systems, they expose themselves. There are valuable clues hidden in the huge number of financial transactions that move through our financial system every day that might mean the difference between a successful investigation and a dead end. Things like an address that might link two conspirators. Following the money to identify terrorists and sympathizers is pretty much invisible to the public, but it can be a powerful tool in the fight against terrorist groups.

Did you know my old pals over at Treasury have an Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence? It’s there to both protect the financial system and disrupt the networks that support terrorists and other national security threats. Even though the Secret Service was created to fight counterfeiting, Treasury has never had a fully functional intelligence office before, and this one’s staffed by expert analysts focused on the financial networks of terrorists and other threats to our national security.

The detectives at Treasury work with the financial sector to identify illicit activity and exclude it from the channels of legitimate business. They go through all available financial information, from suspicious activity reports and subpoenas and other filings institutions make under the Bank Secrecy Act, to track and disrupt terrorist money flow. That’s how they’ve been able to shut down corrupt charities and expose terrorist financiers. And that has a deterrent effect on future potential donors to terrorist causes.
They also help other law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community by sharing financial data that can help them "connect the dots."

What’s missing in all this is, they need to cooperate better with foreign governments. I know the Canadians and Australians are also financial data to map and disrupt terrorist financing networks just like we are. Finance ministries in lots of countries are working the national, security front. Getting together would multiply our effectiveness. If we can stay aggressive in following the money, I think we can cut the terrorists off at the knees.